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three balls. The man has a sure bet or loses his job, and his wife has to do some conjuring to
make half a crown stretch two days. No wonder old women used to get branded witches; their financial legerdemain was simply magic. Off she’d trot on a Tuesday with some gewgaw of value only
to her heart. For a ten-bob loan she’d exchange the worn gilt wedding ring or the treasured marcasite earrings handed down from her mother. It would put warm oats in a child’s belly and
coal in a fire. It would buy a piece of leather to mend a hole in her only shoes, and still let her pay the insurance man threepence a week to make sure she didn’t get buried by the
council.
    Then the heat was on to make sure her feckless man didn’t drink away the next pay packet or lend it to a pal who had a ‘sure thing’ at Doncaster. It would send her on Friday
night, shawl about her head, to the gates of Dixon’s Blazes or John Brown’s, a wee rock splitting the flood of men launched homeward by the whistle, searching her man out among the
thousand cloth caps and picking his pocket before the bookie did it for him. The wedding ring would be back on her finger on Monday. Till the next crisis.
    McGill’s had a prime corner position on Bath Street. It made no pretence about its purpose. It was, in many ways, a social necessity, a lifeline. I stood across the street peering through
the dirty windows at lines of shelves displaying the mementoes of a thousand lives. Some of the treasures would have been there for years, surety on a loan that was never repaid, of a broken life
that never quite got mended. Symbols of little failures, burst dreams and ruptured marriages. Eventually, each discarded piece would become the property of McGill’s and be made available for
sale. The perfect place to launder stolen property.
    I took out the list again and ran my eye down the most distinguishable stolen items. Anything with gold or diamonds would likely stand out among the bric-a-brac of the average pile of Glasgow
collateral. Even so, I knew it could be like looking for a teetotaller in a crowd at Hampden. Yet it was all I had.
    I crossed over and pushed in the door. Bells tinkled in the back. I looked around. This was no rainbow’s end. The smell of must clogged the nostrils. There was hardly a bare surface in
sight. The floors were littered with piles of chairs, nests of table and brass coal scuttles. A man popped out from behind a curtain. It wasn’t Aladdin. For one thing he wore pince-nez, for
another he wore a cardigan with leather patches on the elbows. He peered at me. I guess I didn’t look like your average borrower.
    ‘Are ye after something, mister?’
    ‘I might be. Can I just look around?’
    ‘Aye, sure. Help yersel’. But if ye brek onything, it’s yours an’ ye’ll huv to pay for it.’
    ‘Fair enough.’ I started to walk round the shelves, trying not to kick the lamps and odd golf clubs littering the floor. Most of the stuff was junk, much of it coated in a skin of
dust, abandoned long since by the owners. Nothing of real value. Nothing that remotely fitted the description of any of the stolen valuables. There was one glass case, almost opaque with dust and
dirt, but it held little of interest. The contents had lain undisturbed since Kilmarnock last won a Scottish Cup Final: ’29, as I recall. I consoled myself by asking why I thought I’d
strike lucky first time. The city was full of shops like this, and anyway, the stolen goods would be long gone.
    ‘Mr McGill?’
    ‘Aye?’
    ‘Is this all you have? I was hoping to find a wee bit of jewellery. Something nice, for the wife. It’s her birthday just before Christmas.’
    He stared me up and down. I was wearing one of Sam’s father’s old suits, altered to fit by Isaac Feldmann. The cloth was good wool and better made than anything from Burton’s.
My broad Ayrshire accent had been softened by my spell among the petite bourgeoisie of Glasgow University and